Science Exchange Announces $25 Million in New Funding

Science Exchange, the leading marketplace for scientific research, announced today that it has raised $25 million in new funding. The latest funding round was led by Maverick Capital Ventures and also included participation from Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, OATV, Collaborative Fund, YC Continuity Fund, Jose Suarez (CEO of TEDMED), Sam Altman, Steve Case, Paul Buchheit, and others. The company has now raised over $30 million.

Since its founding in 2011, Science Exchange has become the world’s leading marketplace for scientific research services. The company provides secure access to a network of 1000s of screened and verified contract research organizations (CROs), academic labs, and government facilities that are available to conduct experiments on the behalf of scientists. The Science Exchange platform has been used by scientists from over 2,500 different companies and organizations. The company has experienced significant growth in the last 12 months, including seeing the total transactional volume of experiments conducted through the Science Exchange platform grow over 500% in 2015.

"Over $40B a year is spent on outsourced scientific research by the top 50 pharmaceutical companies alone. Much of this spend is highly fragmented across thousands of individual scientific service suppliers, and this fragmentation represents a challenge to both individual scientists and sourcing procurement departments,” said Dr. Elizabeth Iorns, Founder & CEO of Science Exchange. “The Science Exchange platform solves this challenge: we provide scientists with efficient access to a diverse network of qualified suppliers under a single relationship, and at the same time we provide sourcing departments with more information and control over their outsourcing spend."

8 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies now use Science Exchange, viewing it as a way to efficiently access innovative external resources. Science Exchange also helps tackle one of the most significant challenges facing the highly-trained researchers at these companies: time and resources spent identifying and managing outsourcing contracts. James Lillie, VP In Vitro Biology atGenzyme (a Sanofi company), was recently quoted as saying, “We now look at Science Exchange as the best way of finding new outsourcing opportunities with collaborators and CROs. We’re shifting more of our efforts for new outsourcing contracts there.”

As part of the Series B, Maverick Capital Ventures Managing Partner David Singer (former Founder/CEO of Affymetrix, GeneSoft Pharmaceuticals, and Corcept Therapeutics) will join the company’s board. “We spent a lot of time evaluating the growing market for outsourced scientific services. We concluded first, that there is an expanding market need for a marketplace to aggregate the thousands of suppliers, and second, that Science Exchange is poised to become the ubiquitous platform for scientific outsourcing,” said Singer.

Andy Weissman, Partner at Union Square Ventures, who has been on the company’s board since 2013, agrees. "With over 500% growth in marketplace transaction volume in 2015 and some companies already spending over $1M each month on the platform, Science Exchange is the clear market leader," said Weissman.

Science Exchange is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, and has clients, including many large pharmaceutical companies, around the globe. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its team in all areas including product, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success.